New study links carbon pollution to extreme weather

This is more Pablum from that old Warmist apparatchik John Abraham, a professor of engineering whose arguments were notably torn apart by Lord Monckton. He has so often been refuted that one wonders why he still bothers.  I guess he wants to feel that he is a prophet who can save the world.

The stuff below is just another set of models and assumptions with no known predictive power.  And it depends on false premises such as "As humans emit greenhouse gases, the planet warms".  Except that it doesn't.  What happened in the long hiatus from 1945 to 1975?  It is central to Warmist theory that CO2 levels rose steadily at that time.  But there was NO warming to go with it.  Abraham simply ignores what doesn't suit him


It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote about changes to extreme weather in a warming world. That prior article dealt with the increase of extreme precipitation events as the Earth warms. I termed the relationship a thermodynamic one; it was driven by local thermodynamic processes. But extreme weather can also occur because of large-scale changes to the atmosphere and oceans. This issue is the topic of another just-published paper that makes a convincing case for a whole new type of influence of humans on extreme weather. In a certain sense, this study confirms what was previously reported here and here. With the march of science, the tools, methods, and evidence get better each year.

Before getting into the study, a little background. The jet stream(s) are high-speed rivers of air that flow in the upper atmosphere. There’s more than one jet stream; they blow west to east and they mark the separation of zones of different temperatures. A good primer on jet streams is available here.

If you were to stand at the northern pole and travel southwards, you would experience a gradual increase in temperature. However, when you reached the first jet stream (the Polar Jet), temperatures would rapidly become warmer. That is, the Polar Jet separates two different temperature air regions. Typically, if you are north of the jet stream, you are in a colder zone whereas if you are south of the stream, it is warmer. Sometimes, the jet streams undulate as they encircle the planet and these undulations move. So, sometimes you happen to be in a position north and sometimes south of the stream, even though your location is fixed.

The interface between warm and cold temperatures creates a lot of weather-pattern changes. In addition, if the undulations of the streams become fixed, it means your weather patterns will get stuck. For instance, you could find yourself in an upward undulation for weeks or longer and experience warm and potentially dry weather. Alternatively, if your location is north of a stuck jet undulation, you may experience persistent cold weather. Perhaps even more importantly, these stuck waves can become larger in their magnitude.

So, scientists really want to know what affects these undulations – both their magnitudes and their persistence. We also want to know whether these undulations will change in a warming planet. This is precisely where the new study comes in. The researchers used both weather observations and climate models to answer these questions. What they found was very interesting.

Using measurements, the authors documented what conditions led to extreme weather patterns that persisted for extended durations. They found that many occur when the jet stream becomes stationary with the undulations stuck in place. They also saw that under certain situations, the jet stream undulations do not dissipate in time; they become trapped in a wave guide.

Interestingly, this pattern of a stuck jet stream would occur when the number of undulations was between six and eight. When these circumstances all lined up, according to study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf:

"the same weather persists for weeks on end in one region, then sunny days can turn into a serious heat wave and drought, and lasting rains can lead to flooding"

And this is also how humans come into the story. As humans emit greenhouse gases, the planet warms. We know that, we predicted it, and it is occurring. However, the warming is not uniform. The Arctic, for instance, is warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet. As a result, the temperature difference between the Arctic and the rest of the world is reducing. It is this temperature difference that maintains the jet stream patterns. As stated by lead author, Michael Mann:

The warming of the Arctic, the polar amplification of warming, plays a key role here. The surface and lower atmosphere are warming more in the arctic than anywhere else on the globe. That pattern projects onto the very temperature gradient profile that we identify as supporting atmospheric waveguide conditions.

The authors compared the observations to computer models and they found similar patterns. The authors went on to say in a press release:

Using the simulations, we demonstrate that rising greenhouse gases are responsible for the increase ... We are now able to connect the dots when it comes to human-caused global warming and an array of extreme recent weather events.

This is really where the science is. We know humans are causing climate change and we know that weather will change as this process evolves. What we really want to know is how human-caused climate change will influence extreme weather. It’s extreme weather like droughts, floods, heat waves, etc. that cause high social and economic costs. These authors have concluded a convincing study that connects the dots. Perhaps the study is best summarized by Michael Mann, who said:

We came as close as one can to demonstrating a direct link between climate change and a large family of extreme recent weather events.

SOURCE





UK: Every Climate Initiative Imposed On Us By Politicians Has Ended In Disaster

Christopher Booker

‘The truth is that every single green scheme the politicians have fallen for has proved to be a total fiasco: failing to achieve any of the results claimed for them and costing us more billions with every year that passes.’
Image result for GWPF climate change act Miliband

What a parable for our times the great diesel scandal has been, as councils vie to see which can devise the heaviest taxes on nearly half the cars in Britain because they are powered by nasty, polluting diesel.

This week, it was announced many diesel drivers will soon have to pay fully £24 a day to drive into Central London, while 35 towns across the country are thinking of following suit. Already some councils charge up to £90 more for a permit to park a diesel car.

The roots of this debacle go back to the heyday of Tony Blair’s government, when his chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, became obsessed with the need to fight global warming.

Although he was an expert in ‘surface chemistry’ — roughly speaking, the study of what happens when, for example, a liquid meets a gas — King had no qualifications in climate science.

On one occasion he famously told an environmental audit committee of MPs that the world was warming so dangerously fast that, by the end of this century, the only continent on earth left habitable would be Antarctica.

His light-bulb moment came when he learned that diesel emits less CO2 than petrol. What a brilliant way it would be to save the planet, he thought, to manipulate the tax system to encourage motorists to make the switch — which millions did.

And here we are 15 years later, being told that, as an unexpected side-effect, more than ten million diesel vehicles on Britain’s roads are chucking out so much nitrogen oxide and other toxic pollutants they are being linked to 12,000 premature deaths a year.

This is only the latest in a seemingly endless flow of examples of supposedly ‘green’ government schemes which, one after another, turn out to have been standing common sense on its head, at a cost which is rocketing up by billions of pounds a year.

There may be other competitors for the title of the greatest scandal in Britain today, but this is so crazy that it is time we all woke up to how damagingly mad it has become.

Nine years ago, MPs voted almost unanimously for then Labour minister Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act, thus making Britain the only country in the world committed by law to cut its ‘carbon emissions’ by 80 per cent in just 40 years.

Not one of those politicians bothered to wonder how in practice such an absurdly ambitious target could be met: which is why we have since seen successive governments thrashing about trying to adopt one dotty ‘green’ scheme after another.

Last week, I was asked in conversation: ‘Why is it that almost all these green schemes seem to end up as a fiasco?’ To which I replied: ‘You’ve only got one word wrong there. You can leave out the word “almost”.’

The truth is that every single green scheme the politicians have fallen for has proved to be a total fiasco: failing to achieve any of the results claimed for them and costing us more billions with every year that passes.

Consider the scandal of Drax in Yorkshire, until recently the largest, cleanest, most efficient coal-fired power station in Europe. Now, thanks to an annual half-a-billion pounds of public subsidy, Drax has been switching from burning coal to millions of tons a year of wood pellets.

Absurdly, these are shipped 3,500 miles to Britain from the U.S., where vast acreages of virgin forest are being felled, supposedly to be replaced with new trees that will eventually soak up all the CO2 emitted by burning them.

Unfortunately, a bright spark has just pointed out in a report for a respected think-tank that it could take a replacement tree hundreds of years to grow to maturity — which would be far too long to have any supposed effect on any climate change. (It should be noted that the former coalition energy minister Chris Huhne, having been released from prison for perverting the course of justice over speeding points, became the European chairman of a firm called Zilkha Biomass, which makes its money supplying wood pellets from North America to Europe.)

The bottom line is that a new report has just confirmed that, far from reducing its CO2 footprint, Drax is now emitting more than it did when it was only burning coal.

Meanwhile, why is Northern Ireland going through its worst political crisis since the end of the Troubles? Because of the collapse of its power-sharing government over another green scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive.

When businesses discovered that for every £100 they paid for wood chips to heat their offices, warehouses and factories, UK taxpayers would pay them £160 in subsidies, not surprisingly they kept their boilers running round the clock as if there were no tomorrow.

When it was discovered that, by 2020, we will have paid those businesses £1 billion — even to heat buildings left empty for years — this created such a scandal that it brought down the government.

That example made headlines, but the same is happening quietly in the rest of the country, too, where owners of large houses openly boast that they are running their boilers flat out, even in summer, to cash in on the racket which gives them a 60 per cent profit on every £1 they spend on wood chips.

Some of that wood is now coming from clearing priceless ancient woodlands, such as a National Trust estate in Cheshire which the charity plans to turn back into open heathland.

Another scandal created under the same scheme is the way canny developers are plonking down large industrial installations called ‘anaerobic digesters’ in the middle of the English countryside, to turn huge quantities of crops into small quantities of methane for the national gas grid.

Official figures show that, thanks to subsidies costing us more than £200 million a year, 131,000 acres of maize are now being grown to feed the anaerobic digesters, on land formerly used for food crops.

Separately, toxic spills of the ammonia that is used in the process have repeatedly poisoned livestock and fish in nearby fields and rivers.

Then there was the dream of ‘carbon capture and storage’, for which Gordon Brown’s government offered £4 billion for companies to come up with a way of removing CO2 from the coal and gas used to make electricity, and then piping it away for burial in holes under the North Sea.

Only one Scottish power station took up the offer, spending £1 billion before it discovered that it didn’t work.

But even though geologists say it can never work, the Government still talks about it as the only way it can allow coal and gas-fired power plants — which still supply more than half our electricity — to stay in business.

Consider, too, the not-so brilliant idea of bribing motorists to switch to supposedly ‘green’ all-electric cars. So far, this has cost us more than £50 million in subsidies, for the mere 50,000 cars which have been sold, at £25,000 or more a time. This is only a fraction of the 26 million cars on Britain’s roads.

And what gets cynically hidden by the authorities is that much of the electricity used to charge their batteries comes, of course, from fossil fuels. Add in emissions from the manufacturing process and, unsurprisingly, these vehicles give out more CO2 than they are claimed to save.

Yet under the latest ‘carbon budget’, a five-yearly environmental plan nodded through by MPs to meet our commitments under Miliband’s misguided Climate Change Act, they still fondly imagine that, within 13 years, 60 per cent of all Britain’s cars will be electric. [...]

When we consider that colossal sum, most of us may well conclude that our politicians must have gone completely off their heads.

Except that, alas, our MPs live in such a bubble of unreality that few will even have looked at those terrifying figures, let alone at what they are allowing our money to be spent on.

It was exactly a year ago that Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy described the Climate Change Act as ‘a monstrous act of national self-harm’. It is high time his boss realised just how chillingly right he was.

SOURCE




Electric plane fantasy

By the 2020's, a new startup is planning on building a fleet of hybrid electric jets to fly between regional airports in the United States. Zunum Aero, with the backing of some major airlines, wants to finally make electric flying possible.

Just coming out of stealth mode, the Washington-state based company looks to make short trips, like flights to Boston to Washington, DC, or San Francisco to Los Angeles, with no need to refuel. The company believes this could reduce the costs of these short flights by 40 to even 80 percent.

The first class of aircraft will be small with a 10-passenger capacity and a range of up to 700 miles on a single charge. The Zunum (which apparently is a derivation of "tzunuum," the Mayan word for hummingbird) planes will have hybrid electric motors, a capacity to accept recharging power from a variety of sources, and hopefully a thirty-year lifespan.

The company expects electric batteries to improve as time goes on, so that by the 2030's they could build planes seating up to 50 passengers capable of 1,000 miles on a single charge, allowing for multi-region flights, like Portland, Oregon to L.A.

"We're entering the golden era where we'll have high-speed links to every community on the backs of quiet, sustainable hybrid-electric technology," CEO Ashish Kumar tells The Verge. "And that's going to happen really fast."

Kumar has won the confidence of fellow Washington-based aerospace giant Boeing, as well as JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue Airways, both of which have invested in the company. Kumar has not released the size of either investment, Zunum, which has been at work on the concept for three years.

Electric airplanes have many complexities that cars don't. Weight is exponentially more important in the air than on the ground, but Zunum completed work on its powertrain and preliminary design of its aircraft, saying it's now in "build phase."

SOURCE




Climate Change Fan Fiction From LA Times: Global Warming Caused The Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill

Environmentalists have pinned every one of Earth’s calamities on the presence of climate change, from terrorism to prostitution to drug addiction. Running out of chilling subject matter, activists are now retroactively blaming famous disasters on global warming in a crusade to punish “dissenters.”

A few years back, the Energy and Environment Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism wrote a series of pieces in the Los Angeles Times claiming that oil giant Exxon had engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to conceal the link between fossil fuels and climate change.

The entire series was thin gruel, but read it for yourself. You may immediately recognize reporters who are working backwards from preconceived notions. Broadly speaking, the series is predicated on the idea that corporations have a responsibility to embrace the most far-fetched and apocalyptic conclusions about global warming — notoriously unpredictable even for those who buy worst-case scenarios — and then peddle those predictions as fact.

The series was an excuse for a number of attorneys general — most notably, anti-free-speech advocate Eric Schneiderman of New York — to retroactively punish with investigations companies that failed to adopt liberal political positions on global warming. It was also meant as a warning for the future. What’s most ludicrous about these efforts is that they rely on a mythology: if only Americans had been aware of this crazy phenomena called “global warming,” they would have immediately abandoned all the comforts of modern life.

In any event, the tactic has not worked, for many reasons, including impediments like the pesky First Amendment. So the Energy and Environment Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times rolled up their sleeves and created another piece of activism to buttress the cause.

Most of us remember the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill, which was one of the costliest oil-spill disasters in history. The massive environmental destruction it inflicted on Alaska cost Exxon a total of $3.5 billion in cleanup and court costs it’s still paying off. It remains the second largest U.S. oil spill after Deepwater Horizon.

Well, The Los Angeles Times now claims the Valdez struck Bligh Reef because the Columbia Glacier had been shedding icebergs. So, in short, the Valdez crashed into a reef (not the ice) in Prince William’s Bay because Exxon had failed to warn people in 1989 about the dangers of global warming. This is so preposterous, the piece will probably win a Pulitzer.

First off, using this calculus, anyone can blame basically anything that happens to them on climate change. Did you avoid a puddle when you hit that telephone pole? Sue Exxon!

Somehow, since 1989, thousands of tankers have been able to ship oil from Alaska to California and avoid hitting the reef, even with the presence of a bay “riddled with icebergs” that were allegedly caused by Exxon failing to take responsibility for anthropomorphic global warming in 1980s.

You can read about the Valdez disaster all day long — the lawsuits and the stories and the investigations — and nowhere, as far as I can tell, will you ever run across the claim that the Valdez disaster had anything to do with Exxon denying climate change.

The Alaska Oil Spill Commission mentioned nothing about the icebergs in the bay being out of the ordinary. In its final report, the commission says “small icebergs from nearby Columbia Glacier occasionally enter the traffic lanes.” Nor did the government report blame ice. According to the National Transportation Board investigation, the crew was overworked and the radar system was not working correctly.

Who knows? Maybe the slight increase in temperature that day enticed the captain of Valdez to go binge drinking? Sue Exxon!

None of this is journalism — not even opinion journalism. It’s activism. It’s a concerted effort to rewrite history and create a new Big Tobacco.

Step one: Activists at the Rockefeller Family Fund help underwrite a partnership between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times. According to The Wall Street Journal, part of the foundation’s broader agenda is “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Step two: Working from this starting point, The Los Angeles Times delivers the goods. (Now, that’s not to say that a story can’t have merit because a journalist is funded by a think tank or activist group. It’s to say that writing a story claiming the Exxon-Valdez oil spill was caused by global warming is a transparent way to create ammunition for a political crusade.)

Step three: The corrupt New York state AG coordinates with the Rockefeller Family Fund and uses the stories they funded to launch his politically motivated thought-police investigations.

Oil corporations should, of course, be held responsible for the messes they create. I don’t believe any reasonable person would disagree. But until humans stop running things, there will always be calamities and accidents. So we can debate the importance of fighting climate change. You can continue to mock “deniers.” But you can’t rewrite history to suit your contemporary political needs.

SOURCE.  A thorough debunking of the claim here




Off to a bumbling start at Interior

If this is the kind of housecleaning and swamp draining we’re going to get, we’re in real trouble

Paul Driessen

Was it because there were too few senior Trump Administration officials in place to catch and stop it? Or because Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was new on the job, and had so much on his plate, that this decision just slipped right past him?

Maybe it was because the new Administration faces so many battles with environmental activists already that it didn’t want another one?  Or perhaps Interior was intimidated by environmentalist lawsuits challenging President Trump’s 60-day delay of newly-issued Obama Administration regulations?

Whatever the reason, Trump’s Interior Department opened a real can of worms when it let the Obama Administration’s last-minute endangered species designation for the rusty patched bumblebee (RPB) take effect March 21 – exactly 60 days after President Trump issued his regulatory Executive Order.

The designation has serious adverse implications for Mr. Trump’s ambitious plans for infrastructure improvements, economic growth, job creation, and reining in regulatory abuse and overreach.

Already, officials in the Minneapolis area have delayed a road construction project – purportedly near a patch of potential RPB habitat – while they look for signs that the bees are actually nesting there. Another Minnesota group is trying to use hypothetical threats to RPBs to delay construction of a wastewater treatment plant that would prevent pollution from reaching sensitive state waterways!

And this is just the beginning. It will happen again and again as anti-development agitators use this designation to theorize that construction projects and even farming operations could risk harming an “endangered” bee species or its possible habitats.

In issuing the “endangered” designation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) advised that “The rusty patched bumblebee is likely to be present in scattered locations that cover only 0.1% of the species’ historical range.” Thus, government agencies need only be consulted or issue a permit for developers to “take” (disturb, harm or kill) the bees in these limited areas.

However, 0.1% of the RPB’s historic range is still an area of roughly 6,000 square miles: 3.8 million acres – equivalent to all of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. And that’s just the beginning.

The real kicker is that no one knows where that 0.1% area might be, scattered in tiny bits and pieces all across the 13 Northeast and Midwest states where the rusty patched bumblebee has supposedly been observed (by amateur entomologists) since 2000. That’s 378 million acres: equal to the combined land area of Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana!

That’s partly because the Obama FWS issued the endangered species designation without developing any protocols for actually identifying the ground-dwelling bee’s nesting sites. They could be anywhere in that 13-state area – which means environmentalists could delay, block or bankrupt every new power line, bridge, highway, pipeline, housing development, plowing operation or other project in the affected states.

The decision gives eco-obstructionists another powerful weapon against projects they oppose. They’ve already proven they are smart, determined, coordinated, well-funded opponents of President Trump’s infrastructure, energy, job and economic improvement agendas. Why give them more power?

Even worse, this insect designation opens the floodgates. Whether Secretary Zinke realizes it or not, waiting in the obstructionist wings, right behind the rusty patched bumblebee, are two more bumblebee species whose potential habitats spread across 40 states. The yellow-banded bumblebee has been found all the way from Montana east to New England, and down the Atlantic coast to Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina. The western bumblebee’s range includes the entire block of eleven western states plus parts of Alaska: nearly a billion acres.

Put together, we’re talking about nearly half of the United States!

That’s a monstrous new complication for property owners, states and communities – and for the Trump Administration’s economic plans – at the end of a long, painful decade of economic doldrums that require concerted efforts to get job and economic growth back on track. And there’s even more to come.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature says over one-fourth of 47 native North American bumblebee species face possible extinction. Other radical greens now claim hundreds of wild bee species are “threatened with” or “headed for” extinction. The Center for Biological Diversity asserts that 749 wild bee species are in decline, and half of them face serious risk of extinction.

Real entomologists dispute this. A recent article notes that the CBD report was not peer-reviewed and presented no methodologies or data sources. It quotes Sam Droege, one of North America’s top wild bee experts, who calls the report “extremely misleading” and full of “statistical, taxonomic and natural history problems.” Assertions that some species are in decline are simply false and not based on any evidence, Droege explained. For other species, there simply is not enough data to make any accurate assessment.

This is the Pandora’s box that Secretary Zinke’s Department of the Interior has unleashed, by failing to keep a lid on the FWS actions or review the Obama Administration’s politically motivated, hurry-up designation. In fact, Zinke’s department had ample reason to revise the rusty patched bumblebee designation on January 9, when Team Obama announced its plans. The DOI just bumbled it.

When the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation originally petitioned the FWS for an RPB endangered species designation, it said the species’ decline was due to habitat loss and disease – specifically an intestinal parasite that was accidentally imported to the USA from Europe in the 1990s, during experiments on managed bumblebee hives. But Obama’s FWS arbitrarily contorted its justifications to blame pesticides (specifically advanced-technology neonicotinoid pesticides, a key target du jour of the Environmental Left) for the bee’s decline. There is virtually no evidence to support that.

“The exact cause for the loss of the rusty patched is unclear,” says University of Virginia biology professor T’ai Roulston, “but it’s almost certainly related to disease: the Nosema bombi fungal gut parasite, which can shorten the lives of worker bees and disrupt mating success and survival of queens and males.”

Even more absurd and outrageous, the same Obama USFWS has given wind turbine companies permits to kill hundreds of bald and golden eagles – and thousands of raptors, other birds and bats, many of them threatened or endangered – every year for the next 30 years. So now the mere possibility that insect species could inhabit tiny areas across hundreds of millions of acres can be used to shut down projects, but the FWS will ignore wind turbines that are “incidentally” or “accidentally” killing eagles.

Now that Secretary Zinke has let the rusty patched bumblebee endangered species designation take effect, what should he do? To paraphrase the physician’s oath, “First, do no more harm.”

The new Interior team needs to make doubly sure that no more of these dubious “endangered species” designations slip past them, especially when the less onerous and disruptive, but still protective, status of “threatened species” is available. Secretary Zinke should also take a long, hard look at the supposed justifications for the RPB’s endangered designation, and modify or reverse it as warranted. Terminating or “clean-desking” a few Fish & Wildlife ideologues and IED makers would also be in order.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate should evaluate this designation and its employment, economic and land use implications, pass a “joint resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act, and send it to the White House. President Trump should sign it forthwith, and support one more vital action.

In the hands of agitators, ideological bureaucrats and friendly judges, the Endangered Species Act has become a powerful weapon for controlling land use and obstructing projects. Reforming the act, to curb this kind of nonsense and abuse, would be a good next step once these immediate problems are fixed.

Via email




Retiring Staffer Claims EPA Employees Were ‘Insulted’ By Trump’s Recent Visit

Weren't public servants supposed to be impartial?

A retiring Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employee said career staff were “frankly insulted” when President Donald Trump visited agency headquarters to sign an executive order rolling back global warming policies.

Michael Cox, a retiring EPA staffer who worked on global warming programs, wrote in a letter to Administrator Scott Pruitt that it “was beyond comprehension that an administration could be so arrogant and callous.”

Trump visited EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., in late March to sign an executive order asking the agency to review the Clean Power Plan (CPP) — an Obama-era regulation limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

The CPP was the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s “Climate Action Plan.” Trump’s order also eliminated Obama-era directives to federal agencies on global warming and a Department of the Interior moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal lands.

Cox says these actions were an insult to EPA employees who work on these issues. Previous news reports highlighted the tension between career staffers and the Trump administration.

One former EPA official suggested career staff would boycott Trump if he ever visited the agency. That’s on top of reports staffers sent encrypted text messages to resist the administration’s goal, and news that employees would slow-walk or even ignore orders.

One unnamed EPA employee told ProPublica “more than a few friends were ‘coming to work in tears’ each morning as they grappled with balancing the practical need to keep their jobs with their concerns for the issues they work on.”

“One of the main purposes of my letter was to really get across to Administrator Pruitt that for him to be successful … the career staff have to really be a part of that whole thing,” Cox told Politico.

Cox’s letter comes after a leaked budget document revealed more details about where the Trump administration is looking to cut. The White House recommended cutting EPA’s budget 31 percent and reducing its workforce by 20 percent, or 3,200 employees.

Among those let go could be 224 full-time employees in EPA’s Climate Protection Program, according to the leaked memo. Cutting those positions would save $70 million.

Pruitt is set to meet with Trump in the White House Tuesday afternoon. It’s unclear exactly what the two will discuss, but budget issues and the recent executive order are likely topics.

Pruitt and Trump could also talk about nominating political appointees to fill positions at EPA. Republicans have expressed concern over not having political appointees in place to help Pruitt carry out Trump’s agenda.

“It’s not shaping out as well as it should,” Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe told Politico. “They’re not there yet where they can be very productive.”

SOURCE

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